to being in a new country, all that strange food and foreign water, unless Johnny had something for it. I hadn’t even had time to get all my shots before we left; Johnny hadn’t even brought it up. Probably because she had had all of hers for years, and I’d never even left Canada before. If I shit myself to death, would she pause to memorialize me before racing ahead to solve the mystery and close the gate? The greater good, you know.
She had this mantra. Or manifesto. Anyway, this immovable hierarchy in her head, that she’d tell reporters, students, anyone who asked. About how you had to get people food and clean water and a roof over their head before you got to anything else. How you had to vaccinate their babies, prevent the early childhood diseases, quickly and completely treat whatever you had failed to prevent, and then leave people to it. At once. And in totality.
She had invented these... I can’t remember what she called them. Something Pods, missing out on the chance to call them Chambers Chambers before the reactor ever came along. A self-contained flat-topped cone, for refugees and natural disaster victims and so on. You’d do your stuff on the main level and then there were a couple of steps up into a loft area, for sleeping and food storage, a fold-out solar array for powering flashlights and phones, a little water capture device that could get a certain amount of moisture out of the air. And depending on how you shut the portholes and flaps, your cone could withstand being hit by a hippopotamus or washed away in a flash flood. And you’d be fine. Safe, fed, dry. I think there were something like a half a billion of them out there now. Stocked with her vacuum-packed protein pastes and cubes, and the chemical toilet, and the compact fuel packs that burned for days.
And people would say “So now you’re going to stop the local warlord? Arrange a treaty with the neighbouring assholes? Take away their nukes?”
But every time, she’d say, “No. I’m providing necessities. Anything else is up to them.” Adamant, unbending. You don’t treat the symptoms, she always said. You treat the illness. If there is lingering fever or coughing, the patient can deal with it themselves.
I remembered the summer she’d developed that ration paste, looking for something heavy in fats and proteins, savory and sweet, shelf-stable. She processed nuts, seeds, protein gunge cooked up by bacteria in the labs, whatever she could think of—obscure beans, bark, seedpods, the coverings of strange fruits, stopping just short of mealworms. I ate sample after sample and kept getting sick. She’d yell at me, seeing the empty spot in the fridge, one grid missing out of nine or twelve or fifteen, fucking up the whole experiment, and I was always unable to explain why I simply picked food up and ate it when I saw it. I was ten or eleven and I simply could not explain myself.
I looked across the aisle; she was blackout asleep, curled around her music player, all cried out. “CDs will be dead soon, Nicky,” she’d told me when she released the players, one of her few forays into gadgetry. “This is what people will want, and Apple will make millions of them. Digital music will take over. Better than what you can get on Napster.” She had been right, of course, at least about the players. The first batch had sold out in a month, the factories scrambling to keep up. The glass ones, that looked like a bottle of perfume; the metal ones, like a flask, satisfyingly heavy; the plastic and rubber sport ones in black and blue and red and white that everyone ended up buying that showed fingerprints instantly. And hers, the only one of its kind, made of wood that only grew softer and smoother over the years, her thumb slowly rubbing away the design of leaves and vines on it, pale gold against the sepia of the wooden casing. If you didn’t know better, you’d think she’d fallen asleep cuddling a yoyo. Always wanted to be special.
Always had been special. Even before I knew. I thought about City Hall again, the shooting. The first day I ever saw her face.
What else did those old memories hold? A perpetual darkness, smell of urine, someone big who smelled of cigarette smoke, pushing me... faint sunrises and sunsets, broken by flashlights and headlamps...
Years later, when I